February 2012

February 13, 2012

I have admired Jim Tyler's work ever since David gave me a Tyler broadside of his haunting poem "Dutch Interior." Tyler works quietly at his letterpress in Ithaca, New York. He sets type entirely by hand, one letter at a time, and prints on a hand-operated press, slowly, one sheet at a time, and one color at a time. The results are precise and beautiful, as you can see in the slideshow below (be sure to use the full-screen option).

Framed broadsides make terrific gifts, don't you think? You can find a complete list of Larch Tree Press broadsides here and here. Or you can write to jim-tyler@fast.net to ask about availability and prices.

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I had to take a seminar to learn how to be a “writing intern” in the Humanities Core. This involved writing fake comments on fake student papers and pretending to read books about pedagogy. At one point we were asked to identify what was wrong with various claims in a student essay. The problem with one claim, about Patroclus as I recall, turned out to be that the student had framed the claim in terms of Homer’s intentions.

This was interesting: a New Critical no-no had been elevated to the status of a pedagogical given. It was supposed to be obvious that the appeal to authorial intention was always and everywhere to be avoided. Now, I hold very little against the New Critics, who were supple and intelligent readers of poems, and Wimsatt and Beardsley’s original brief against “The Intentional Fallacy” remains one of my touchstones of twentieth-century literary criticism. But it’s not as if there’s no controversy here. Because I’d actually done the reading for a different class, I knew that the instructors of this seminar were ignoring the difficulties posed by bodies of water that begin spontaneously to quote Wordsworth.

In 1982, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels shook up the bottle city of literary theory when “Against Theory” was published in Critical Inquiry. It’s a stunning and intricate defense of intentionality whose thesis is that it’s simply a truism that when we ask what a text means we are asking after its author’s intention. Theory is therefore superfluous. But what everyone remembers is the wave poem.

“Suppose,” Knapp and Michaels say, “that you’re walking along a beach and you come upon a curious sequence of squiggles in the sand.” These marks, on closer inspection, prove to spell out the first stanza of Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal.” Naturally you will assume someone inscribed the words there, probably with a stick. But then a wave comes in, you retreat, and when it recedes you see that the first set of squiggles has now been joined by a second, which prove to be the second stanza of the poem. At this point only two possibilities present themselves: either there is some agent producing these marks by invisible means (some scientists in a submarine are testing a new beach-poetry ray) or they have been produced purely by the chance operations of natural forces. But if the marks are not being produced by an intentional agent—this is the kicker—then, say Knapp and Michaels, they are not language. The marks, although identical to the marks that make up Wordsworth’s poem, bear only an accidental resemblance to words. They are not, in themselves, words, because words must be produced by beings who know how to use words and intend them to express meanings. Therefore our discovery of words’ meanings is identical with our discernment of their author’s intention.

There’s a lot more to Knapp and Michaels’ argument, but my reaction to this part of it remains what it was when I first read it: no wave is ever going wash up a couple of stanzas of Wordsworth by chance. Knapp and Michaels recognize this, of course: it’s a thought experiment. But my response registers an intuition about the utility of thought-experiments for making judgments about the real world. Whenever I hear that a train is going to run down five hapless people unless I pull a lever, in which case it will run down only one hapless person, I want to know what those people are doing on the tracks in the first place, why I can’t just yell at them to get the hell out of the way of the train, and how exactly I managed to get myself involved in some ridiculous ethical drama in a train yard when I haven’t been near a train yard in years.

February 12, 2012

I'm told Sunday's a "low numbers day," so I'll start posting in earnest tomorrow, but I thought I should come in here & noodle around a little. I'm a fairly lazy reader of contemporary poetry—if I'm not reviewing a new book of poems, my method is to pick the book up whenever I happen to remember its existence, read a poem or three, & put it back on the shelf. I'm usually reading four or five books at once, but unless that poem or three kill me, I'm content to let most contemporary poetry remain a dark continent I dream of colonizing one day. LOL metaphors!

The upshot of all this is that there are several piles of contemporary poetry books—I'm already tired of typing those words, instead of "contemporary poetry" I'm going to say "cantaloupe"—several piles of cantaloupe books lying around my apartment at any given time. Now I will go over to the nearest pile of cantaloupe & report back to you on its contents. Writing is so funny, how it works. OK, so that pile had Paul Muldoon's Maggot, D. A. Powell's Chronic, Mary Ruefle's Selected Poems, & A. R. Ammons's Sphere. I don't know what Sphere is doing in there, it came out in the seventies, & I've actually read it. The Muldoon came out in 2010 & the Powell was published in 2009, so you see what I'm dealing with here. Ruefle's book I've read most of, but that's because I was teaching it.

February 11, 2012

This week we welcome Michael Robbins as our guest blogger. Michael’s first book of poems, Alien vs. Predator, will be published by Penguin in March 2012. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He reviews books regularly for the London Review of Books, Poetry, The New York Observer, and several other publications. Michael received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago. Read Robert P. Baird's interview with Michael here.

February 09, 2012

Kevin Young, this year's Best American Poetry guest editor, will be criss-crossing the country over the next few months. If you're lucky, he's planning to stop in your town. You can find his full schedule here. In addition to being an award winning poet, non-fiction writer, and anthologist, Kevin curates the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University and is the curator of literary collections. His exhibit, Shadows of the Sun: The Crosbys, the Black Sun Press & the Lost Generation is up through March 16 and should not be missed. David and Kevin talked about this historic exhibit last fall. You can listen here.

T. P. Winch writes to tell us about a wonderful project undertaken by the Crozet Library, a branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Three years ago, the library started the Poem in Your Pocket Day program as part of National Poetry Month. You can watch a video about last year's program here.

We're over the moon with excitement about Jim Cummins new book Still Some Cake. We've posted some of Jim's great poems (along with his prose) here. We'll be posting more over the next few weeks but, in the meantime, get your order in by clicking on the cover image below. Congratulations Jim!

Since it's inception in 2008, we here at the Best American Poetry blog have cheered on Bill Cohen, one of our favorite bloggers, as he has assembled an array of tattooed poets for his site Tattoosday's annual tribute to National Poetry Month. We are once again thrilled to spread the word to inked poets everywhere. Bill would like to post an image of your tattoo on Tattoosday every day during April. Tattoos need not be literary in nature to qualify. If your ink is featured, Bill hopes to give a little history of your tattoo, some background about you and your poetry, and he'll include links to your own website, books, and poems. With your permission, he'll even post a poem. Last April, Tattoosday recorded over 30,000 hits and nearly 50,000 page views.

In addition, you'd be joining the ranks of ninety poets, several of them BAP contributors, who have participated in years past. You can see who's been cool enough to join the ranks here .

February 08, 2012

Cordials took a hit with the advent of infused liquors. They used to be our sturdy flavor friends, rarely useful, but rising to the taste when called upon. Now they’ve been downsized, as vodka got more productive, infusing itself with a frightening range of non-vodka tastes. Many of the flavors, raspberry or mint, to name just two, supplant a hard-working cordial like Chambord or crème de menthe in contemporary drink recipes. And cordials have another problem: their biggest purveyor in the US is probably DeKuyper, whose labels tell all: I WAS DESIGNED BEFORE POTTERY BARN EXISTED! Enough bartenders brew their own bitters these days—the culinary equivalent would be starting a fish stock not by putting a carcass into a pot of water but by tying your own flies and heading off to Idaho—that brightly colored corn syrup ain’t coming near their specials menus.

Cordials weren’t always so out of touch. I can’t help but think they are due for a comeback, like moderate Republicans. Indeed, a smattering of cordial missionaries are out there in their Bay area backyards, going to insane lengths to recreate crème de noyaux. Don’t try this at home, really, no matter how much Mr. Manhattan says you can. You have to crush the pits of apricots in order to get the kernels, then crush the kernels into a powder, then steep the powder in brandy for a month, then…we’re just getting started. Plus nobody seems to know the full recipe. There might be other kernels—cherry? peach?—to pulverize as well. And something to make it pink. Unless it wasn’t pink back when people knew how to make it. Who can say?

Lots of question marks here, but then lots of distinguished cordials—Chartreuse, Benedictine—have secret recipes and exotic histories involving religious oddballs. Which brings us to Mitt Romney, the endangered cordial of presidential candidates. Surely no one can dispute the oddball history: a great-grandfather, packed off to Mexico with his five wives to preserve polygamy. Oops, that’s three wives. Wife Number Two divorced that particular Romney and he hadn’t married his fifth one yet. He got around to her later, in 1897, seven years after the Mormon church “banned” polygamy. Apparently he was not alone in defying the LDS church ban. The man who issued it, Wilford Woodrow, added a wife or two to his own post-ban collection as well.

All of this was over a hundred years ago, and it’s fair to ask whether any of it matters. After all, Jimmy Carter’s oddball brother was alive and operating during his lifetime, and the less said about Newt’s three wives at this point, the better. Plenty of other presidential candidates have had recent messes, from W’s drinking problem and Ron Paul’s racism to Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problem. What matters from a voter’s perspective, though, is not how recent the event is but how the candidate handles its relevance. Romney’s an active member and elder in the Mormon church. He talks the faith talk incessantly. He’s even taken to accusing Obama of waging war on religion. Since he brought it up—indeed, making himself the defender of God—the details of his faith ought to be relevant. But rather than address them, Romney airbrushes them out. His message is that the Church of Latter Day Saints is just like any other Christian faith. No need to look under the hood, ma’am.

In 2007 he gave a “major” speech on his religion, hoping to put any further inspection to rest. The key passage is this:

"There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes president he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.”

Nope, no need to look under the hood. The only doctrine he specifies is in the paragraph before: yes, Mitt Romney believes in Jesus Christ. Stop the presses. The rest of the speech is an argument for religious tolerance. Well, almost. Early on he slips in that “Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us,” which doesn’t sound terribly tolerant to me. Surely the 1.57 billion Muslims around the world get more out of their religious life than hate. Also notice that, while he argues he shouldn't “become the spokesman for his faith,” Romney doesn’t hesitate to speak for what Islam is all about.

It’s illustrative to compare Obama’s speech after the Wright explosion. Remember? Yes, you probably do, unlike Romney’s speech, which you’ll have to look up like I did. Obama talked about the underlying issue, race, but he did so by laying out in vivid detail the unique aspects of his own situation as a biracial person. He described his white grandmother who loved him dearly but whose remarks about blacks sometimes made him “cringe.” (I am paraphrasing from memory. And Obama gave that speech four years ago.)

Obama addressed particulars, which is why his speech is memorable. By contrast, Romney delivers generalities. "There are some,” he says, repeatedly, followed by something you doubt anyone actually said. “I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law,” he says, using not the personal pronoun “my” to modify “church,” but the generic and categorical word “any.” The only time he names his Mormonism is when he assures us that he’s not about to renounce his faith, as “some” would prefer. By the end, Romney’s no longer an individual. He's the plural "we": “We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places.” Ah, we’re to think. He’s just like you and me. (But not like those Muslims, goes the subtext. For all the talk of tolerance, this is a Christian “we,” with Jews as honorary members.)

In the Middle Ages, cordial meant “from the heart.” That usage is obsolete. Its primary function today is to appear, somewhat insincerely and always adverbially, in the valediction of business letters, or, even more insincerely and adjectivally, as the modifier of choice at press conferences by congressmen after partisan negotiations, to describe how the closed-door “discussions” went. Why, they were “cordial.” Airbrushed, anyone? By the way, cordials, those drinkable nouns, do have one known ingredient: sugar. They are always sweetened. Mitt Romney, who's cordial enough, comes across as hiding a secret recipe, somewhere under that airbrushed hair. The only thing we can say with certainty about the candidate is that he has been seriously sweetened. Maybe he’s not due for a comeback.

Edmund Wilson called it a "shock of recognition," the realization of a truth that you knew but did not previously recognize. It took me twelve hours to be shocked into realizing that the small pain in my right shoulder with radiating lines flying out from it across my chest might be a heart attack. Then it took fourr days to get to a doctor and a hospital, have tests, wait for results, get scheduled, and undergo surgery requiring six by passes. I did inquire when I woke up if they had contacted the Guiness people to see if anyone had topped me.

Unfortunately, the surgery was just the beginning. I had a series of bad reactions, so far requiring four stays in the hospital, having needles stuck into my back and side and up and down my arms.

Of course, coming face-to-face with age, illness, and mortality is difficult for everyone. I experienced it, though, not just as a person but also as a writer. I had the energy to read and watch television but not to shape sentences and paragraphs.I couldn't write for months.

It was my cardiologist who told me to work on another book. Indeed, he got animated, declaring it as a medical necessity for me to begin writing again, to take my mind off my body's betrayal. That day I contacted my editor and got approval to write a book about American Jewish films. I'm going to begin writing that book soon.

That was good, but I had a deeper emotional need. I began thinking about a novel I had written just before the attack. I had put it aside, ignoring it in the face of grappling with survival. The Land of Eighteen Dreams is an episodic novel made up of eighteen chronologically-conected stories, each of which is self-contained. All of these episodes concern Lily, who grows from age eight to adulthood, and her grandfather. His stories distill the inherited folk wisdom of Eastern European Jews and serve as an ongoing account of American Jewish life.

I sat there and read the novel again. I had set the early part of it in Queens, where I grew up next to La Guardia Airport. I used to duck when the planes flew over. I had included some of the neighborhood characters, such as Dan, the Ice Cream Man who gave quizzes and then gave free ice cream to those who answered correctly. His first question to me was "How much is 8 and 6?" I pondered long and hard before answering, wondering if the laws of mathematics had changed since I learned how to add. They hadn't, and I got my ice cream.

Flooded by memories, I wanted to publish the novel. My agent was kind and was willing to approach publishers. But here my health became a giant barrier. I wasn't allowed to drive. I was too weak to travel. I couldn't visit potential editors. And, worst of all, I couldn't participate in the required active promotion of a book. There was going to be no novel because of the heart attack.

A friend of mine came over for a visit. He had published various novels and even had one made into a television movie. Now he was self-publishing. I'd never considered doing so but there was a logic to the approach for this novel. I found a reputable place (one that didn't accept all that was submitted) and arranged for the novel to be published.

I want to believe when you write about like minds that it’s my like mind, not that of Boy George or Famous Author. What started you on the idea of writing to the famous, knowing that someone else entirely will be reading into the “you” in these poems? Not that Boy George doesn’t read your poems. You’re big, too. But mostly it’s me and patrons of the St. Mark’s Bookstore admirably waiting for your next book. And we want you to want us, too, even in a purchasing fashion. It’s entirely reasonable. We want you to bring us home and sit us down in your living room and tell us who you’ve been listening to lately. What have you done lately that was bad? I saw someone reading Wheat Belly on the train. Have you read it, too? It’s about when my folks come to see their New York daughter, and I do things like their Kingstree daughter. Amy Gerstler, I don’t diet. How do I get through this city? I bought a pasta maker and now I can’t stop. I love it. You should buy one! You could get a really good one, as an accomplished poet.

Dwight Ripley has his first show in fifty years, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which he helped to found in 1949. In the little back room, where John Ashbery has shown his collages, where so many small but exquisite presentations have been offered, there are fifteen pieces hanging: letters, landscapes, four-paneled stories, illustrated poems. Ripley’s life, writes Douglas Crase in Both, his double biography of Ripley and Rupert Barnaby, lifelong partners, “was a mix of friendship, travel, enthusiasm, and incident.” The works here, chosen by gallery directors Andrew Arnot and Eric Brown and on view through March 10, engage us with all of these energies of personality, space, and time, “bright with wit and foreboding, affection, and above all, a radiant intelligence” These works—113 drawings made by Ripley between between 1946 and 1973—were stored in a footlocker for decades in the home of Douglas Crase and Frank Polach, and finally brought out by Crase, as he tells the story in the exhibition catalogue and elsewhere.

The earliest piece, from 1946, is entitled “Evolution with Mushrooms, Bud, and Pineapple” and combines ink; colored pencils in pink, olive, charcoal gray, and russet; and cut-outs collaged from what look like etchings from a sample book or dictionary. The pineapple is lushly leafy top and bottom, precise, round, and Victorian in aspect; a morel neatly tops an extended abstract laddering form, stretching out into the disk of a bittersweet-berry orange sun.

A letter from 1951 on a sheet of stationery from Wappingers Falls, New York, has a spouting whale floating in a sort of asymmetrical alembic, which rises from a curving vaselike cage. A peacock is inscribed vertically, with full-spread tail, inside the vase’s cylinder. The poem that these creatures illustrate begins with a title and two lines of Hungarian, which, as Google Translate informs me, mean something like “a whale is resting on water the color of emerald: he is very lazy.” The poem is titled “A Hímzett Hím,” “the embroidered male,” and continues:

But Mr. Peacock cannot rest:

He’s frantic for an underdressed

And madly mousy peahen.

Another drawing captures, in two tall wavering Gothic cartouches, a pair of quotations from Joan Miró’s Constellations, flanking a similar horn-shaped cartouche holding a stacked set of five rows of stained-glass windows. These three shapes stand in front of a brick wall, a chicken-wire fence, a row of thin vertical stripes with a pale green band at its foot. Over them floats the shadow of a bird on a trapeze. Something about the translucence and solidity of colored pencil is particularly satisfying when depicting the light that glows behind stained glass and that fails to penetrate through shadows.

Crase characterizes Ripley’s series of thirteen Travel Posters, from 1962, as “landscapes, but . . . so stylized, so deftly combined with text and other allusions, that even on first sight they presumed you would regard them with an attention more complex and historicized than we might give to ordinary landscape. They were, in other words, remarkably up to date." Elsewhere Crase writes that the works were “so structurally and keenly colored that each drawing . . . seemed almost to project an alternative spectrum of its own.” All thirteen were shown in 2009, at Esopus Space; seven are on view at the Tibor. I found standing in front of each landscape again rewarded me with many new appreciations, not only of details of color, but with surprises and delights of reading Ripley’s loopy calligraphy: what do these pictures say?

There’s something at once private, obsessive, and trangressive in what Ripley’s done with words in these landscapes. His images begin with a bored gradeschooler’s habit of doodling in secret at his desk with a pencil, pen, or markers, filling in the loops of cursive l’s and o’s and e’s, or the teacher’s big red letter grade on top of a page of homework: capital D’s, especially, fill in nicely, but an A or B will, too. The similarity begins with Ripley’s ballpoint-pen-inked lines, and carries through because of colored pencils. You’re not supposed to do that, are you? It’s what you do as a prisoner in class, when you’re not listening, when you’ve tuned out, when you’re obsessively somewhere else. It’s so cool that Ripley, the baby millionaire exiled to boarding school well before adolescence by his inattentive mother, remembered and valorized that desperate kid’s psychic escape strategy. My affection for his art begins with its grain of painful truth about art, which his wit wraps round with shiny adult experience.

And what escapes! The Travel Posters at the Tibor feature—what to call them? wordscapes?—of Alicante, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain; El Cabo de Gata, to the southwest down the coast; Loulé no Algarve, Portugal, on the Atlantic side of Gibralter; and Setubal, halfway up the Portuguese coast. As Crase reads it for us, the Cabo de Gata beach is neatly labeled with the proper binomial terms for its native vegetation: Cichorium spinosum, Erythrostictus punctatus, and Apteranthes gussoneana. A road upwards has Antirrhinum charidemi both lettered and growing beside it; printed on the rock is Dianthus charidemi.

February 02, 2012

We've featured Stephanie Brown's prose and poetry here so often over the years that we've given her her own category. One of our most popular posts continues to be Sex in the Stacks, her piece about the sub genre of pulp erotica that features librarians. Stephanie's poems have been included four times in The Best American Poetry (1993, 1995,1997,2005). Most recently, David singled out a poem of Stephanie's on NPR as being one of his three favorite poems of 2011. In short, we're big fans of Stephanie Brown and we think that if you read her work, you will be too.

And if you happen to be in NYC tonight, February 5th, you can hear Stephanie Brown in person when she shares the bill with David Lehman at the KGB Bar. (7:30pm - 85 East 4th Street NYC - Free) It's going to be a great evening.

You have occupied my husband’s imaginationwhen he otherwise might have been bored. You gave him pretty shapes to beholdat the mall, in the supermarket, when he peeredfrom behind his Newsweek at the airport.Oh thong-wearer, the strings risingfrom your crack like bird’s wings in flight.Oh pencil skirt, snug jeans, short shorts,bikini bottoms, capris and the circlesthey contain. Oh billboard buttocks,magazine tushes, movie star derrières.Oh porno fannies, soft core rumps,the heinies of whores, the gluteus maximusof the girl-next-door. Oh Asses of Other Women,our relationship, I know, has not been one of ease.For years I feared you, feared that my husbandwould follow your wiggle and leave mefor your high-branch peach, your airbrushed apple.I also feared the eyes of your men, their animal glances,their whistles when you were not with them.I have put up with their flirting, as I hope you put upwith my husband’s. If you are like me, I know you will notalways like it, but on a bad day it can almost be welcome,remind you of what can sometimes be lostin a long marriage. Oh Asses of Other Women, you are beautiful, with or without a stranger’s validation. You know that, and your men know it too. Yet, if you are feeling kind,please ask the face attached to youto humor my husband with a smileshould he look up to find eyesand when your husband looks my wayI will try to do the same.

I first heard this song two weeks ago while watching a certain period drama series and now I can't get it out of my head. Here's a clip of the same song being sung in the 1944 British film Immortal Battalion. Isn't it terrific? -- sdh

February 01, 2012

The sun came out today. Blue sky and small white clouds. I don’t care, being human is such a poke in the eye. I throw myself out there though and I’m much better. I know in my guts nothing will help but I remember as a dry fact that sun and nature can jigger the register. And it’s true.

Weather this warm on the first of February is all wrong but it feels so right. My tree art is painting pictures with its spinning and is casting constellations of sun dots tripling over everything. The circles of light play over tree trunk and branches and fences and over the ground, so it looks like a burbling stream catching spots of light as it runs vertically as well as horizontally, racing around in a wide circle. In the photo here I capture two or three of the circles of light, in real life ten or more arive at once across the tree and branches.

To my memory most of the great nineteenth-century novelists were crazy for listing the flowers they’d see on their walks, names and descriptions, how each looked singularly and as a sudden mass, scents at onset and in decline. I’m not downright Dickinsonian in my habits but I live such that my lingering outdoors in something like nature is most likely to happen in my own little backyard. This time of year there are fewer surprises than in the other seasons, though nature always has a bit of a show for you, even just the shapes of the dried leaves, but mostly I am delighted by the speckled dalliance of my tree art as it tickles this grey brown season into a little giggle. Also, the pitch black puppy chases the shining spots of light.

I'm going to hear the poets at Cornelia St Cafe tonight, Jennifer L. Knox, Marion Wren and Amy Lawless -- they are going to rock. Maybe I'll see you there.